DEA head warns of meth surge, including meth-laced pills targeting college-age adults

As federal authorities continue to crack down on the spread of fentanyl across the country, the Drug Enforcement Administration is warning about a surge in the use of methamphetamine, with DEA officials expressing particular concern over meth-laced pills being sold as drugs like Adderall to college-age adults.

"What we've seen here recently, that frightens me," acting DEA administrator Robert Murphy told ABC News' Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas in an exclusive interview.

Murphy said the DEA expects its seizures of methamphetamine to nearly double this year compared to last year.

The DEA has so far seized about 70,000 pounds of the drug this year, already nearly matching the numbers reached in all of 2024, Murphy said.

"Methamphetamine is by far the most coveted drug," Murphy said. "This is what people want."

The DEA has become so concerned about the continuing boom of methamphetamine use that it's planning to hold a press conference on Tuesday to draw attention to it.

"In the first six months of this year, we've already seen more than ... what we seized last year," Murphy told ABC News. "And we project ... we're going to double what we seized last year."

Murphy said that one of the most disturbing things about methamphetamine is that "Mexican cartels control 100% of it."

"They control production, the smuggling, the distribution in the United States, and obviously the actual collection of monies and getting the money back into Mexico," he said.

And cartels are growingly increasingly creative in how they try to smuggle meth across the U.S.-Mexico border -- from hiding packages of meth pills among green onions to disguising meth shipments as loads of celery.

In one location during the week of July 4, the DEA discovered hundreds of boxes of cucumbers that had been lined with several hundred pounds of meth, worth nearly $4 million.

And in May, with assistance from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, federal authorities arrested six people who were allegedly bringing liquid meth into the United States and driving it to Kansas by hiding it in the septic tank of a charter bus.

Authorities became suspicious after realizing that the bus rarely had any passengers.

"They're only limited by their imagination," Murphy said of the smugglers. "And they have a very broad imagination."

Murphy called it "a cat and mouse game."

He said cartels now have a "huge focus" on pills, which he said have less of a stigma than injectable drugs.

As a result, Murphy said, turning meth into pill form makes it more marketable, and therefore more easily sold as something it's not, such as fake Adderall or fake MDMA -- the active ingredient in ecstasy.

"[It's] all of the drugs that that are wanted by our college-age kids, and younger," he said. "They're actually getting meth, and they don't know this."

According to the most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, drug overdose deaths in the United States sharply decreased by almost 27% last year.

But while fentanyl and other opioid-related overdoses dropped the most -- by more than a third -- overdoses related to meth and other psychostimulants dropped the least -- by nearly 22%.

"You're buying a pill off the street nowadays, you're taking your life in your own hands," Murphy warned, saying that that "almost everything" the DEA is now seizing turns out to be "fake."

"And as an investigator, our men and women have a hard time distinguishing between what's real and what's not," Murphy said. "So there's no way the average user is going to be able to do that."